Will the environment be the Vietnam government’s downfall ?

Environmental protests are proving a tough challenge for the communist
regime.

For years, Tran Thi Nga was subjected to harassment and brutalization by the
Vietnamese authorities, the details of which emerged in a fresh Human Rights
Watch report published earlier this year. She was finally arrested in January
for using the using “the Internet to post a number of video clips and articles
to propagandize against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” as the state media
reported it.

What she had actually done, in fact, was to participate in a number of
environmental protests and show solidarity with fellow activists by meeting
with them at their homes and attending their trials.

She is not alone. In the space of a few weeks, Vietnamese authorities also
rounded up Nguyen Van Oai, a former political prisoner, and Nguyen Van Hoa, a
human rights activist who campaigned against the Formosa Steel environmental
disaster (more on that later). Months earlier, they had arrested Nguyen Danh
Dung; the bloggers Ho Hai and Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh; and a number of indigenous
Degar protesters. According to Human Rights Watch, there are at least 112
bloggers and activists currently serving prison sentences for nothing more than
speaking their mind.

What strikes the mind is that many rights activists in Vietnam have focused
their campaigning on environmental issues in recent years. Why? First, because
it has become a pertinent problem in the country. In April 2016, exceptionally
large protests took place across Vietnam after toxic discharge from the Formosa
steel plant resulted in an estimated 70 tons of dead fish washing ashore along
more than 200 kilometers of Vietnam’s central coastline.

The February 18-24, 2017 issue of The Economist’s Asia column, Banyan, was
written from Dong Hoi, a provincial capital on the central coastline, where
thousands of dead fish washed up on the shores throughout 2016. Today, the
inhabitants are scared to eat the fish living off the coast, tourist numbers
are down, investment has almost ceased, and fisherman struggle to make enough
just to get by. Elsewhere, the environmental situation is not looking any
better. The Economist reported that pollution mars much of the country’s
landscape — dam-building is corroding the Mekong Delta; smug smothers Hanoi
while much of Ho Chi Minh City may well be underwater by the end of the
century. The full list of problems goes on and on.

Interestingly, another reason for the surge in environmental protesting is
because the environment is one of the few issues that cuts across all divides.
It unites poor rural fisherman and relatively wealthy urban liberals; consumers
and producers; democrats and socialists.

This is also the reason why it has become an important issue for the
Vietnamese government. I suspect it knows that, unlike trade unionism or free
speech, environmental concerns embolden critics and disaffect loyalists. The
impoverished sympathizer might stomach a muffled media and the party
ventriloquizing for the masses. But when farmlands flood because of industrial
waste and poor upkeep, or waters contain only inedible fish, or a foreign-owned
factory treats the country’s environment with contempt, the ideals of the
communist revolution must be cast in doubt.

As a result, the government has sought to curb environmental damage. Indeed,
its has fairly robust “green” laws (most on paper are stricter than China’s)
and plans to cut carbon from its economy. Though, as The Economist rightly
noted, “How this squares with plans to build dozens of coal-fired power
stations is anybody’s guess.”

The Vietnamese government, however, will fail. The environment, arguably to
a greater extent than other concerns, shows the fundamental problems that exist
in Vietnam’s atavistic Communist regime.

Indeed, for all the apparent complexities of the politics of Vietnam, it is
actually rather simple: without elections and any meaningful public engagement,
the government’s legitimacy depends on economic growth. But environmental
concerns are severely testing this legitimacy.

One example: The government has long claimed that activists are mere stooges
of foreign powers. Now, it is the one defending foreign investors accused of
environmental destruction.

More importantly, to sustain economic growth, the Vietnamese government
needs foreign investment, mainly from China, which is the very thing that will
destroy the environment, as the people of Dong Hoi know all too well. A
spokesman for Formosa, a Taiwan-based company, was rather prescient when he
said the Vietnamese should decide if they want to catch fish or “build a modern
steel industry”. A subsequent hashtag, #IchooseFish. became popular on social
media.

Even though Vietnam’s central government has decided that environmental
destruction needs to be curbed, it is up against the monster it created. A
pillar of Doi Moi, started in 1986, was decentralization, the shifting of power
from the center to the provinces. However, by 2004, when the government issued
Resolution 08, it was clear things hadn’t gone to plan. “The conception and
awareness of decentralization policies and solutions are unclear, incoherent,
and inconsistent between the central and provincial governments,” the
resolution reads.

One would not expect anything more verbose from the pen of an apparatchik.
Nonetheless, it is clear that as early as 2004, the government was aware of its
own mistakes. Even so, decentralization was always tainted by its fundamental
incompatibilities with the regime. As Vu Thanh Tu Anh, director of research at
the Fulbright Economics Teaching Program in Ho Chi Minh City, wrote in a 2016
paper, “Vietnam: Decentralization Amidst Fragmentation“:

Decentralization necessarily requires a fundamental shift in the role of the
state, from social planner and decision-maker to facilitator and rule-setter.
However, in such a hierarchical and unitary system like Vietnam, this shift is
never simple as it not only involves changes in the government’s internal
organization, but also undermines its inherently discretionary power.

Tu Anh then went on to say that “increasing autonomy for the local
government does not by itself ensure accountability.” One might say the
opposite, in fact, because accountability was never a factor in governance in
the first place. Without democracy, who holds Vietnamese politicians to
account? Those higher up, typically. But decentralization weakens the
hierarchical chain, creating a country of chieftains, as some analysts claim —
or the “localism and regionalism” the authorities warned of in 2004. Such
ineffectiveness was mocked by The Economist. “Whereas smog-fighters in Beijing
have begun closing factories and restricting car usage,” it reads, “bigwigs in
Hanoi still struggle to prevent scooter-riders from parking on the
pavements.”

This is how we end up in a situation where the central government can
introduce laws to curb environmental damage and few politicians at the
provincial level pay heed. Indeed, many have grown fat from ignoring
regulations. The only solutions are to strengthen the will of the central
command, endangering the decentralization program that is four decades in the
making, or attempt to reform the actions of the provincial administrators,
which doesn’t appear to be fruitful. With neither working, the Vietnamese
government has reverted back to what it knows best: muzzle dissent and continue
as normal.